Apparently, for a large number of readers, the choice whether they select to read a paper or not is often strongly influenced by the title.

I was wondering if the MO-users would be willing to share their wisdom with me on what makes the title of a paper memorable for them; or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable?

This advice would be very helpful in helping me (and perhaps others) in designing better, more informative titles (not only for papers, but also for example, for MO questions).

One title that I find memorable is:

Nineteen dubious ways to compute the exponential of a matrix by C. B. Moler and C. F. van Loan.

EDIT:
The response to this question has been quite huge. So, what have I learned from it? A few things at least. Here is my summary of the obvious stuff: Amongst the various "memorable" titles reported, it seems that the following statements are true:

A title can be memorable, attractive, or even both (to oversimplify a bit);

A title becomes truly memorable if the accompanying paper had memorable substance

Titles that are bold, are usually short, have an element of surprise, but do not depart too much from the truth seems to be more attractive in general.
5.101 Mathematical succinctness might appeal to some people---but is perhaps not that memorable for me---so perhaps such titles are attractive, but maybe not memorable

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3

For news article and fiction, certainly; in some rare cases for expository material. But I can't say it's ever happened to me for math research articles (I'll post an almost-exception in the answers). And just as well, really, most papers have really dull titles! (The worst is when the titles are dull and vague.)
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Thierry ZellOct 31 '10 at 14:45

4

I'd have put in "A Contribution to the Mathematical Theory of Big Game Hunting" as an answer, but that's carrying a joke too far I think.
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J. M.Oct 31 '10 at 15:19

11

Entertaining as this list may be, I seriously doubt that it will be a useful prescriptive guide as to how to title one's papers. Editors' and readers' tastes also change over the years
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Yemon ChoiOct 31 '10 at 19:35

5

Since this question seems to have turned into a big list of "memorable/amusing paper titles," ignoring the primary question "what makes the title of a paper memorable?", perhaps it might be helpful to re-ask that question but without the loophole "...or perhaps just cite an example of title they find memorable".
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Mike ShulmanNov 1 '10 at 0:23

8

I have now caught a duplicate answer for the second time in as many days on this thread. To me this casts doubt on the usefulness of this thread, but I acknowledge that I have a long-standing bias against these types of questions, which from previous discussions on meta seems not to be shared by most people
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Yemon ChoiNov 2 '10 at 1:19

They tell the reader who is familiar with the subject. I cannot even tell what subject they are about.
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Mariano Suárez-Alvarez♦Oct 31 '10 at 17:20

3

That's true, but I figured any readers looking at papers by that particular author would know what they're about. And everyone in this field certainly knows that author, so there would never be any confusion.
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Spiro KarigiannisOct 31 '10 at 18:33

That one is sort of a cruel example, as it was due to Gamow's sense of humor that Bethe was invited; he did not even have anything to do with it. Alpher was just a student at the time and felt afterwards that his contribution was drowned out by the bigshot names. (This is all just paraphrased from the Wikipedia article.)
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Ryan ReichNov 16 '10 at 11:17

The following is not quite as arresting as the other titles listed, but Stallings has a paper in Inventiones entitled "The topology of finite graphs". It's a pretty gutsy title, but what's even more impressive is that it is a fairly good description of what the paper contains (namely, a totally new approach to studying questions about subgroups of free groups using finite graphs; this is totally different from the classical approach using covering spaces of graphs)!

I hope it is OK to mention "A Disorienting Look at Euler's Theorem on the Axis of a Rotation" even if I am a joint author, particularly if I admit that none of the authors thought up the cute title---it was the editor. (The cute part is the somewhat subtle use of "disorienting", namely we prove Euler's Theorem for orthogonal transformations that are not proper---i.e., don't preserve orientation.) You can download it here: